By transporting viewers to Ellie’s birth and revealing her mother, Anna, the Season 1 finale of HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation introduced one final significant character for the first time! The episode sadly spends little time with Anna, who is in labor.
Anna is portrayed by none other than Ashley Johnson who actually plays Ellie in the video game. In the opening sequence of the episode, we see Anna fleeing some infected and finding temporary safety in a farmhouse.
Just before giving birth to Ellie, Anna is regrettably bitten, however, when one infected manages to get in as she is giving birth.
As a result, she only gets a short time with Ellie before Marlene shows up and takes her away, promising to keep her safe and then reluctantly killing her infected friend.
Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann said on The Last of Us podcast that it was precisely why they waited until the end to introduce Anna to the world.
It’s a painful moment to see, and it’s even more devastating to watch when the first season draws to a conclusion.
Mazin noted that it “Hurts more. It hurts more,” said.
Ellie’s backstory had to be the cold open for the episode without a doubt, according to Druckmann, and Mazin confirmed that this was always the idea even before production began.
Mazin went on to share that it “Had to be that. From the start. Because we need time to meet Ellie, and we identify with Joel from the beginning. Joel clearly feels like he is the main character, the protagonist. We see him before all of this with his own daughter. And then there is this kid. He has to take her somewhere. We’re discovering Ellie through him. And it was important, I believe, to not short circuit it by showing us stuff about her that he did not know and to give her unnecessary context. It is better to watch her becoming who she is with him and just let that relationship be its own thing and, when no one is expecting it, throw this heavy right hook.”
The creator went on to explain that the heartbreaking scene “does a couple of things. First of all, it contextualizes Ellie in a moment we are the most concerned about her as when we came off of the episode prior, she’d just killed a man in the most brutal way and had been traumatized by her experience with him. And the other thing it does is connect her birth to the choice Joel has to make at the end of this season. Marlene is there. So, we understand now, okay, all the way back in episode one. Marlene said that I put you there, Ellie – are you my mom or something? – it was a joke back then. But here we sort of answered the question of who her mom is. And in a way, Marlene was her mom since from basically 2 hours after she was born, Marlene becomes the person who looks after her. And it also links to the nature of her immunity. So, when we get to that end, there is Marlene saying that she was there when she was born, and she leaves out the fact that she was the one who killed her mother. It all makes sense in the end it couldn’t have been done anywhere else.”
Later on in the podcast, Druckmann also pointed out that moment allowed the series to set up some huge parallels between the lie Anna tells Marlene about cutting the umbilical cord before getting bitten and Joel lying to Ellie about what happened while she was unconscious in the Firefly hospital.
“The common thread is that they both lie,” he notes.